You sit down. Take a deep breath. To relax, you scroll through Facebook and catch up on your email. Meekly, you join the other mesmerized zombies…

All wired now

We’re all wired now, incessantly interacting with our digital doodads. You don’t worry about your own habits because you’re a grown-up, but you do fret, enormously, about the possibility of your kids contracting wicked side effects. When you were a youngster today’s devices were barely imagined. Today, kids spend seven hours a day, on average, on some sort of electronic device, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, and 97 percent of teens ages 12 to 17 play digital games.

Are kids’ brains in danger? Or not? If tech toys are mentally malevolent, why are our kids so happy? But if we take the e-companions away, our kids go crazy… like addicts!

To determine the neurological impact on our little ones’ minds, we took a close look at the research, and what it says about the e-things your kids are obsessed with, to determine the effect on their developing brains.

Violent, vacuous — or vindicated?

Video games come in many beguiling forms, but only a few subgenres have been examined closely in terms of their effects on the brain.

Dr. Daphne Bavelier, brain scientist at the University of Rochester and the University of Geneva, has prolifically researched homicidal “first person shooter” (FPS) games such as Call of Duty. Her research found that gamers’ brains show activity in multiple brain regions, indicating numerous — and surprising — visual-spatial benefits in areas like perception, attention, task switching, mental rotation, brain plasticity, learning, short-term memory, crowding acuity, contrast sensitivity, and perceptual decision processes.

But wait: are these types of visual-spatial skills useful to anyone other than future assassins? Yes. Many bloodless vocations — including engineering, mathematics, natural sciences, economic forecasting, architecture, art, and design — require the eye-hand intelligence that video games develop.

In fact, many daily modern chores — like reading maps, driving in heavy traffic, packing objects, and orienting yourself in a new environment, such as a school or office building — demand visual-spatial intelligence.

Girls and games

Two visual-spatial skills — attention and mental rotation ability — are more developed in males than females. This provides boys, many researchers believe, with an edge in mathematics and engineering. Want your girl to catch up? A surprising study from University of Toronto suggests that “only 10 hours of training with an action video game” decreased or eliminated the female disadvantage.

But researchers disagree. Psychologist Christopher J. Ferguson of Stetson University believes data in studies linking video games and violence have been improperly analyzed. He contends that this research ignores important social factors — such as mental health status and family environment — that can trigger violence, while pinning all the blame on gaming. His prolific research supports his conclusion that factors like depression, antisocial personality traits, exposure to violence in the family, and the influence of peers are far more likely to trigger aggressive behavior than gaming.

What’s the damage?

Will video games ruin vision, destroy attention spans, and eviscerate impulse control?
In fact, the opposite is true, according to brain scientist Bavelier. She cites abundant evidence that tech toys train brains to see better. Video games also don’t lead to distractability, she asserts; au contraire, they can improve attention. The 2013 Italian, Polish, and Dutch study also observed that gamers’ impulse control was undamaged by the hobby.

Less bloody alternatives

If you don’t like violent video games, or if you have younger kids for whom such games are not appropriate, there are other options. Try steering your children toward “real-time strategy” (RTS) games, such as Civilization, Risk, Age of Empires, and StarCraft.

Take caution: warfare lurks in this genre too. But it’s far more subtle — with more emphasis on other, less lethal activities — including exploration, managing an economy, and building construction. Meanwhile, you get the gift every parent wants for his or her child: cognitive gain. A 2013 study at Brock University in Canada found that students who played strategic video games reported that gaming increased their problem-solving skills and that these enhanced skills led, in turn, to better grades. A 2013 South Korea study that conducted brain scans on the nation’s professional Starcraft gamers found enhanced cortical thickness in three brain regions and concluded “long-term playing of online games is associated with… cognitive flexibility.” (Tip: Starcraft II’s three-dimensionality boosts four brain regions that are not enhanced playing two-dimensional Starcraft I).

If you want 100 percent peaceful play, try Tetris, the block-fitting puzzle game that packs skulls with smarts instead of bullets. Japanese researchers reported that Tetris, practiced 15 minutes a day, five days a week for four weeks, led to improved attention and visual-spatial ability.

A third genre that may enhance intelligence are the open world games such as Minecraft, the Swedish sensation that has sold 35 million copies. Minecraft.edu helps teachers use the complex, captivating game to teach subjects like physics, geography, and languages.

Is gaming addictive?

This is a concern for many parents. “Anything that stimulates pleasure can be addictive to a very small segment of the population,” according to Ferguson. “Some individuals have difficulty regulating their reward centers and balancing short-term rewards with consequences.” Ferguson argues that pathological gaming infects 3.1 percent of the population, less than alcohol abuseamong kids ages 12 to 17 and far less than kids over 18. “Parents should be concerned about that.”